


The Velocity Of A Kebab

by roblingt



Category: Torchwood
Genre: 15000-25000 words, AU, Alternate Universe - Canon, Multi, Rare Pairing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-22
Updated: 2009-11-22
Packaged: 2017-10-03 13:37:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roblingt/pseuds/roblingt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The flap of a wing, a slight change of angle, and the task of chasing after the spooky-do's could have fallen to another of Cardiff's finest...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Everything Changed

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](http://community.livejournal.com/tw_bigbang/profile)[**tw_bigbang**](http://community.livejournal.com/tw_bigbang/) 2009

The coffee in these places always seemed to be almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea, Andy thought morbidly, staring at the thin grey dregs in the paper cup. Maybe it was meant to be a disincentive to letting your friends take the sorts of risks that might end in this. _A stupid bang on the head_. A stupid bang on the head, sorting a stupid row in a pub, and here you were, sitting in a corridor, wondering how the day had gone from Gwen Cooper's gap-toothed grin talking _X-Files _rubbish about the case that'd had them out last night in that wet, to wondering if you'd ever hear her talking any rubbish, ever again --

This medic wore an even grimmer expression than the previous one had, taking too many words to explain that _no change yet_ was closer to _who should we notify_ than anything warranting optimism. "No, no, I've rung her partner, I mean, I'm her partner, I've rung her boyfriend..."

Rhys turned up not long after Andy's third cup of shite coffee, looking like the one who'd been hit on the head. "Thanks for staying, mate."

Andy shrugged. "'S my job, yeah, she's..."

Down the corridor beyond Gwen's boyfriend a flicker of blue-grey swirled down a flight of steps. _She was talking about the man in a coat, the man in an old-fashioned military coat_...

Without really thinking about it Andy was up and following with a mumbled word to the preoccupied Rhys about he wasn't sure what, copper priorities or notifications or something that he'd probably realise had been daft for a moment like this when he'd had the chance to examine it. And this _must_ be Gwen's mystery man, there couldn't be two nutters running about Cardiff in antique RAF greatcoats? Slightly deranged flair for the dramatic or not, he wasn't alone as he pelted for the exit, a tiny Asian woman poking at her PDA as she trotted along in his flapping blue wake and two others supporting a staggering man in a shiny boiler-suit, head lolling as if drugged. (Dear god, what was wrong with his _face_ \--) The man in the coat was clearly the leader of this little gang, gaze scanning round the car-park as his henchmen unceremoniously chucked their impaired comrade into the boot of what had to be that same black vehicle Andy had glimpsed pulling up at last night's scene. _Who in the flipping hell _are_ these people?_

Instinct settled Andy behind the wheel of his patrol-car as the Range Rover scarpered, stamping the accelerator to catch up a receding glimpse of shiny black. They appeared to be heading for the centre of the city, flight taking them at barely-safe speeds towards the revitalised bay, indeed, straight for the open space of Roald Dahl Plass itself. Andy's mind started running down a long list of all the potential mayhem even a small group of thugs could get up to in an area crowded with tourists.

He was still considering how to call this in to Control regarding the nature and severity of a potential threat when the black vehicle pulled up near the shining bulk of the Millennium Centre and slowed almost but not quite to a stop. Andy's four suspects hopped out of the Rover with three loud slams, leaving some unseen fifth mate to roar off towards the Centre's car-park with the drugged one still in the boot. Organised enough for a getaway driver, yet. This had to be a gag, he'd get a ring later tonight asking him to sign some sort of reality-show release. This whole sodding _day_ had to be a gag, if he was that lucky. He pulled his own car up onto the paving and got out to follow the four on foot across the Plass. In no particular hurry, any of them, just strolling towards the water-sculpture --

"Oi, you can't leave that here." Andy glanced away to see a security officer striding angrily towards him from the Millennium Centre.

"Police, I was just --" He turned back to gesture after...

The four people were gone.

Well, that was peculiar no mistake. They hadn't had _time_ to cross out of the Plass altogether, surely? "It doesn't matter who you are, you still can't park it here --" _But it's wide, there isn't _anywhere_ that they could have slipped out of sight so quickly_...

Andy gawped at the base of the fountain, wondering if he might want to consider asking for a good long leave before he was _made_ to take one, until the increasing volume of the security guard's hectoring and threats to call his superiors prodded him back into the patrol car. Where he lingered a moment longer to note down the black vehicle's number-plate properly into his evidence notebook, because he was damned if he was going to let this pompous arse put him off doing his _real_ police work, thank you very much. That done, he put the notebook away in its holder, smiled pleasantly out the window at the fuming guard, and returned to St. Helen's just in time to be caught up by a porter who'd been sent to find him, to tell him that Gwen was already gone.

The next while was a blur of medics in white coats tossing around terms like _talk-and-die syndrome_ and _epidural haematoma_ and a grey-faced Rhys mumbling "I'll have to tell her Mam and Da." He declined Andy's offer to drive him out to Swansea, probably because he wanted to pull off and have a good cry once he'd got out of the city, and the constable took his leave hoping he'd have the sense to stay over and get properly pissed while he was about it. Which was advice he should probably take for himself, from the look on Temple's face as he let Andy off his duties, but somehow a pub and its promise of noise and aggro was the last place Andy wanted to be tonight. Not after today. Not after helping her up after that scrum, _catching her elbow as she starts to go down again_ \--

Out of sorts, wandering without conscious purpose, Andy found himself drawn to the water-sculpture in the Plass for the second time that day, pacing back and forth across the paving where those four had vanished between one blink and the next and realising after a while that he'd been trying to work out whether there was any sightline that could possibly have explained it. And there wasn't. _Torchwood. What's a Torchwood?_ At last he came to a stymied halt, staring up at the water flowing down the plane of the fountain and trying to decide if maybe the better option would be to spend the rest of the evening getting off his face after all.

And the paver began to sink.

He nearly jumped off. It would have been the _sensible_ thing to do, to back away and come at the problem through the proper channels, hedged around in words sucked dry of any hint of autonomous reasoning. But Gwen Cooper had thought she'd seen a man woken from the dead not twenty-four hours ago, and if there was a procedure for following up on an incident like that, it sure as _fuck_ didn't involve standing about giving a caution. He owed her memory this much. So Andy held himself still on the descending slab, and let it carry him beneath the world he'd thought he knew. Straight down the rabbit-hole like Alice.

So his city was hosting a team of would-be superheroes, here in a secret cavern bored through its heart: a woman welding, another hunched over a keyboard, some sort of monkey in a lab coat who introduced himself as their doctor. And the military-coat man, Harkness, twitting them all about the lax security. (And all but pinching the bottom of his PA bloke, curiously the best-dressed out of all of them.) Calling himself a Captain, saying that he and his people hunted _aliens_ \-- Andy would have called this a madhouse, except that would mean admitting he'd lost his mind as well, and who was to say he hadn't when it turned out that Batman was not only real he had a flatshare with the men in black under the centre of, well, dull, grey, completely uninteresting _here_...?

After a brief, absurd tour, Harkness escorted him home and invited himself in, digging round for the last two beers in the larder and bringing one to Andy where he'd collapsed onto the settee, head still reeling with impossible visions. (Had that really been a _pterodactyl_?) "Bit much, huh."

Andy took a long pull from his bottle. "I thought she was just taking the piss," he said. "I was slagging her off for saying there was something weird going on in this city. 'Cos it's bollocks, you know? Bloody X-Files, this is bloody _Cardiff_." The Captain's blue eyes were piercing, but they could still soften with an amused chuckle. "But apparently it isn't. Bollocks, I mean. It was the last thing I said to her --" He shivered, thinking the cumulative effect of this bloody mad day must have been a far worse shock than he'd thought if he was crashing this hard before he'd even finished a first round empty stomach or no, and grasped after a fleeting thought: "Thing is, we could help you, the police I mean. People report things, little things, mostly it gets ignored because we think they're talking rubbish, but if some of it's _real_ \-- If you had someone keeping their ear to the ground for it, is all I'm saying."

"But to do _that_, you'd have to remember what you were listening for..."

***

 

Andy woke in his bed, in most of his clothes, with the beginnings of a headache and -- the faintest recollection of someone who smelt really good bending down to give him a peck on the forehead? No, that must have been part of the strange dream as well, bright shards shattering away like fading sparks even as he tried to gather them up for a look before he could forget what it had been about. Dinosaurs, there had been dinosaurs. In welding masks.

He wasn't late for work, because he was off work today, because Gwen was dead. That much he did remember from yesterday, whether he wanted to or not. (And the thought of four people vanishing into the thinnest of air on the Plass, where had that come from?) There was a message on his voicemail with the particulars about a memorial service at the station, which he deleted, and another from a broken-sounding Rhys inviting or rather begging him to drop in at the family's own arrangements over in Swansea, which he noted down the details of wondering if he meant to try for it even as the biro scratched across the paper.

But in the end he went, of course, and of course having to see Rhys was all sorts of tangled feelings, survivor's guilt and envy of the licence to weep openly with her Mam and, somewhere small and shameful, that tiniest flicker of relief that she'd broken it off before _he_ was the one completely unmanned in front of a hall of their nearest and dearest. Bad enough to have lost her as a professional partner, and let what might never have been lie. After the service he let Rhys draw him in for a brief, awkward hug, and promised to stay mates, to the extent that they ever really had been, bound together now with each other's memories all that was left of her in this sorry world. And then went home to his small flat, and some empty while yet stretching ahead of a leave that he would never have wanted to take.

Problem was, he didn't have anything better to _do_. Not an entire day before Andy found himself rummaging mechanically through his locker to get himself kitted out for a shift, stab-vest, hi-vis... and there on the current page of his notebook his own handwriting giving a terse account of the callout that had led to Gwen's injury, and her subsequent collapse, and just above the grim conclusion one curious entry that suggested he'd asked for a check on a vehicle with the number-plate _CF06 FDU_. He'd left St Helen's as Gwen was dying to deal with some bloody _traffic violation?_

Well, Control would know what he'd been about that day, even if it meant admitting he was just that distracted with it all yet. "Yvonne, did the results ever come back on a plate CF06 FDU I was looking into from while Gwen was -- was at..."

Yvonne looked up from her screens to give him a puzzled stare. "First Cooper and her imaginary Captains, now you're chasing phantom cars in her memory? I told you, no such number registered anywhere in the country."

"What? When did you tell me that?"

The look he got said _grief is one thing, mate, but now you're just going mental_. "You could just have asked Temple for more time, Andy, you don't have to prove how broken up you still are about it. If you really feel like you have to get back on the horse straight away I can find you something to do behind a desk, but I don't think we want you out on patrol if you're not ready --"

"I am _fine_," he insisted, wondering why it felt so much like he was trying to convince himself rather than her. _Imaginary Captains_... "I just -- Look, what was I even doing that I asked you to run the check?"

"_I_ don't know, you'd stepped out to find a better coffee and someone made an improper turn in front of you? Weren't exactly in anyone's right mind, were you."

"But --"

"Andy. Go home. Before I have to find Temple and have him make it an order. Go for a nice long walk down by the bay and let the sea air clear your head. The ugly arse-end of the criminal justice system will still be here when you _are_ ready to come back, god knows."

"But --"

"_Go_." Yvonne planted a hand firmly between his shoulderblades and gave him a shove towards the door that set him walking more from polite reflex than any actual power she'd have to move something so large as him.

_A walk by the bay_. It sounded... curiously right, actually, like it might scratch this itch in his head. So Andy shrugged, and signed himself back out with his regrets, and presently found himself coming to the waterfront as twilight deepened, lights just coming on across the broad expanse of Roald Dahl Plass.

There was a woman standing in front of the fountain, looking as if she'd been -- _waiting_ for him? (But that couldn't be, where had he seen...) "He didn't use enough."

"Pardon?"

"You're too big, he mustn't have used enough retcon to erase everything. Or he didn't _want_ to, that would be just like Jack. Always leaving us to clean up his shit."

"Sorry, who's Jack? Who are _you?_"

"It's how they all are," the woman continued as if Andy hadn't spoken, rummaging in her handbag for something that appeared to have sifted to the very bottom. "None of them take this job seriously enough. And it's a shame, because you're pretty, and I wouldn't have minded it, but I still need to test the glove, you see, and --"

She finally found what she'd been searching through the bag for. Andy froze as the streetlamps glittered off a wicked blade, all prongs and ugly suggestion. (That knife, he'd seen a, a sketch? A sketch on the board for that case, the case that, the case that he'd been out in the rain with Gwen --) "You don't want to do this, Miss."

She gave him a small, sad smile. "You're right, though. I don't _want_ to. But it's all I had. And there's still time, I can still fix this. If you're the only one who can connect it all... I still need to test the glove."

_All that time_, Andy thought in mesmerised horror as the woman sprang for him with the blade, _all that time itching in a stab-vest and the one time there's really a knife?_ Training was one thing but the sheer _surprise_ of it had her upon him, one of those jagged teeth scoring a line down his arm before reflex quite caught up to the situation. _Grab here; twist there; restraint hold and --_

_\-- bugger_. Apparently she'd been practising as well. Andy ended flat on his arse on the paving, looking up into calmly mad eyes.

_Two_ pairs of calmly mad eyes -- "Suzie. Drop it. Now."

He'd heard that voice before. _She_ obviously knew it, by the stiffening of her shoulders. "You know I'm right, Jack. We could be doing so much more. The glove could be made to _resurrect_. We can't be afraid to -- to... You _know_ I'm right."

With a tiny sob, Suzie Costello reversed the blade and drove it through her own ribs.

And he _remembered_ \--

***

 

They were efficient, this Torchwood. At least after the fact. They'd bundled away the body, and they'd bundled him below into their base, and they'd bundled him up into a scratchy grey blanket to shiver out his shock on a tatty old settee while their doctor stitched the long gash on his arm. "Typical bloody Suzie." Andy wondered suddenly if the two had been more than workmates. One generally didn't sound that... _bitter_, about losing a workmate.

Jack's administrator silently brought Andy a steaming coffee. He sniffed at it suspiciously. "Not drugged this time, I hope?"

The PA -- Jones, Ianto Jones, the names were starting to stick to the faces again as well -- gave him a look. A very subtle, understated look, but definitely a look. "Ianto would not defile his artistry by putting retcon in your coffee," Toshiko explained. "Although you could have mine if you'd like? If you don't mind two sugars..."

Feeling a bit of a prat for being so distrustful, Andy swopped for the mug she held out to him, turning it round in his hand to sip from the rim opposite the ghostly pink butterfly that proved Toshiko had already tasted of this cup without incident. It was, indeed, artistry. Even with too much sugar. She put a hand to her mouth to cover a smile, and Andy realised he'd been staring into the mug with what must have been a dreadfully foolish expression.

"Leaves us with the problem of what we _do_ do with him," the doctor said as Andy took another sip of the best coffee in the bloody world. "I think his mates at the station would notice something was wrong with him if we tried to scrub out his associations with the area now he's worn that groove in our paving up top." And here he scowled at Harkness; "Maybe if _someone_ had used enough retcon the first time --"

"He did have to remember _part_ of the day, what if he'd gone in to work the next morning expecting to see his partner?" A twist of fresh grief, but blurred now, as if circuits that had been jammed wide open too long had simply lost their capacity to transmit any more signal load. Or perhaps that was the lingering effect of this retcon thing talking, film of oil on the lens of memory never to be completely polished away. "I was trying to finesse the timing. Calculated risk. And _you_ didn't think to go after his notebook?"

Jones gave his employer a look as if to say_ And we're going to find the time and resources to smuggle ourselves into a building full of police after a tiny notebook that may or may not contain anything incriminating to us, where?_ "It was a calculated risk," he said.

"For a high-tech secret organisation you're surprisingly rubbish," Andy said.

"He has us there," Toshiko said. Jones and Harper were nodding in reluctant agreement.

"Hey, I can only work with what I have, you know. If an ordinary Cardiff beat-officer can stay on our scent as well as this one has maybe we need to stop and do a re-think."

"Or hire _him_," Doctor Harper said with a sardonic twist of his lips.

Harkness fixed Andy with a long, considering stare. "Well, he's persistent, methodical, healthy touch of paranoia... I do like that in a man."

"Your standard for what you like in a man is 'breathing', Jack." The doctor was wearing a look on his homely face that suggested Jones's earlier comment about harassment hadn't been meant in jest. "In fact I suspect breathing might be optional, from some of your stories --"

"I was raised never to speak ill of the dead, especially when they're still hot," Harkness replied with a slyly raised eyebrow, and then turned serious again; "Still, we do find ourselves with a sudden job opening here. And it would save us the paperwork on dumping him in the harbor... I say we keep him. Guys?"

"You're the boss," Toshiko pointed out, shrugging. (Not all that disapproving, Andy thought.) The other two agents or staffers or whatever they considered themselves in this organisational chart looked him up and down as if trying to find some hint of fault to legitimise an objection, or possibly considering whether he'd be the one that they'd eat first if they were ever trapped down here by a broken lift, and then Harper slouched back to his desk with a mutter that _couldn't _have been _Just so you don't make me have to think about shagging him, Harkness_...

Those teeth couldn't be natural. "So, how about it? Yours if you want it."

As if he had the choice, really. "One thing. Just, one thing." Andy swallowed hard. "Could you have saved her? With that glove. Could you have brought Gwen Cooper back?"

Harkness shook his head, genuine regret touching those blue, blue eyes. "No matter what Suzie thought, the glove isn't an answer to anything. You have this, for however long, and then... But it's better not to think about that too hard, you'll go kind of nuts." A strange, strange grimace. "May as well grab life as it comes, really."

"And what about you?"

"Our job is to see that people get that chance. Not always that different from being a cop, now I think about it. Although the hours aren't as predictable. So, are you in?" Jack held out a hand, and grinned broadly as Andy took it. "Welcome to Torchwood, Andy Davidson."


	2. Greek Fire

"Once, just once, I'd like to walk into one of these tents and find it's a party. You know, food, drink, people dancing, the girl crying in the corner?"

They ignored Jack, like they always did when he was acting daft to take their minds off things. Owen was still seeing double from the night before, and the night before that, and any number of nights since the Beacons had had him trying to catch whatever moments of legless solace he could in anyone else's bed but his own. He rubbed his forearm across the bridge of his nose and tried to refocus on the skeletal remains half-buried in the strata of the pit, anything but the way Tosh and the newbie were arsing about up at the edge of the dig. Hadn't taken _him_ long to separate the straggler from her herd, oh, no. Not that he could blame her for wandering, the ex-copper was certainly _fit _(and damn lucky Carys had only wanted his swipe-card), and it was a relief not to have the constant crawling sensation of eyes quietly adoring him from afar, but...

But. Yeah, not like he didn't occasionally pull up the footage of _her_ getting down to it with the possessed girl, but that was a bit different, wasn't it? Bloke wouldn't be human, regardless of what he thought of her. Although picking birdshot out of Tosh's stomach was about as intimate as he cared to get, really. Even if she _had_ been the one with the bollocks to straighten out Captain Carrot about the times you maybe didn't want to run straight into the arms of the friendly local Heddlu --

The newbie didn't manage to fall into the pit, quite, though not for want of trying. But he did kick down a clod of earth that hit Owen square on the head. "Oi!"

"Sorry, Owen." Tosh didn't _look_ sorry, though. Not even as sorry as she habitually looked. She turned straight back to Mister Schoolboy-Face Copper and his wide-eyed marvelling at the alien stapler of the week without so much as handing Owen down a tissue. And he was fine with that sudden lack of offering to bear his children, really he was, except now he had grit in his eyes and for once a bit of fawning might have served some useful purpose.

The rest of his workday went about as well once they'd cleared the site for the builders to move back in and transferred their finds to the security of the Hub. Davidson had even managed to ruin several weeks' work on a specimen by absentmindedly shoving a sandwich into the wrong cooler. Owen managed to check the impulse to see what would happen if he gave the sandwich back without mentioning its little adventure and disposed of it properly in the xenohazard incinerator instead, inwardly lamenting the loss to science that Jack's stubborn frowning upon running human trials on Torchwood's employees if it could be helped represented. And being Tosh's new distraction wasn't really sufficient grounds for potentially poisoning someone anyway --

But _that_ was the sort of still small voice best drowned out by finding someone to pull and going back to theirs for a noisy shag. It wasn't necessarily the best night of the week for it, but Owen had a go anyway, propping himself up at a bar while he considered his prospects. _Maybe the blonde with the cracking arse, looks like the sort who might go for the degree_...

"Won't work, mate, she's not into blokes."

Owen turned to regard the man who'd planted himself on the next stool with a withering look. "Sorry, I don't remember asking you."

"Didn't want to see you wasting your time, is all. Saw you at that dig this morning, I reckon you've had a bad enough day you don't need to add a punch in the neck to it. I'm Mark, by the way."

"And I'm really not interested."

"No, you're Doctor Owen Harper, born 1974 in London, recently sacked from the A&amp;E system for shagging your patients. And so you ended up with Torchwood."

It was a cover, but it was a secondary layer of cover, the one Tosh had set up to make a cleverer hacker think that they'd stumbled upon the truth under the first lie. Closer than Owen had seen a stranger get to any of them in a long while. "And Torchwood's a band or something you think I'm in, is it?" He tossed back the rest of his drink and made to slide off the stool. "Sorry, mate, even if I was who you think I am, I don't do autographs --"

"You hunt aliens. And alien artefacts. Like this."

It _could_ have been an ordinary bit of jewellery, just a disk of delicately interlaced wires dangling around Mark's neck from a plain leather cord. But there was something about the way his eye tried to slide off the metal as if it wanted him not to look straight at it that snared Owen's attention, perverse impulse to stare into a perception-filter until he caught it out at its tricks giving away his obvious interest. "Let me guess, you're going to tell me that you know who I am because you read my mind with that thing?"

"It's not so much actual _thoughts_," Mark said. "More... emotions, sensations, a state of mind if you want. You've been thinking that I can fuck off for interrupting you whilst you were on the pull, obviously. But you're interested. Now you're picturing what you could do with a toy like this before your boss took it off you. And it is. It's _amazing_ to shag someone when you can feel everything that they're feeling as well. As long as they're having fun, of course. I'd go on, but you're about to piss yourself with fear --"

Still nothing that a very, very good student of body language couldn't have teased out, Owen reminded himself, as Mark leant back against the bar with a smug lift of one eyebrow. Or someone who'd done enough research to drill down to that cover, preparatory to running a Torchwood-sized con. (Knowing that any of them would _have_ to check it out, sod the professional vanity even, just because that was why they were all _there_ \--) He shook his head. "Nah, it's bollocks, though, innit, 'cos --"

"But you want to find out for yourself."

Perception filter or not, now the pendant was all that Owen could see as Mark looped a thumb into the cord and pulled it off over his head. Held it out, swinging gently like a hypnotist's watch -- "If you --" Owen found that he had to swallow before he could go on; "If you know about me, about Torchwood... Why _approach_ me? Why bring yourself to our attention?"

An eloquent shrug. "Maybe I want to do my civic duty and turn this in to the proper authorities. Or I reckon I might get a better deal if I cooperate before you track me down with it anyway. Maybe I'm just tired of not having anyone to _talk_ to about it. And I don't need this to tell me that you know how _that_ is."

_It could still be a set-up._ The disk was still warm from resting against the other man's skin._ It could fry my brain._ He was lifting the cord to slip it over his head --

_It could be _fantastic.

Mark had been right, the blonde wasn't staring at her mates' tits out of envy. Owen could _see_ the swirling threads of anxiety and hope and the sullen burn of rejection hanging in the air of the club, the inner soundtrack of the mating dance of self-aware young primates throttled up until the volume slider broke off in his hand: _notice me did I just fabulous arse need a fag notice me wrong shoes for going to be notice me he's she's they're enough notice me notice me notice me_

Hands steadying him as he reeled back against the bar; "Easy. It's a lot to take in all at once. Try to focus it. Concentrate on one person. Look at the mousy little bird down the end there, what is she feeling?"

Like trying to pick out one line of a conversation at a crowded table, this was, but Owen shoved aside the competing clamour and tried to listen for a single bright note; "She's... she doesn't fancy her date, she thinks he's..." A sudden _click_ like a joint popping back into its socket and he could, he could _taste_ her disgust, she was going to kill her mates for setting her up with this weed she'd break in two if she tried to wrap her legs round his -- _Always the quiet ones_, he thought as the connection slipped out of his startled grasp. "Why would you let this out of your hands for a second?" he croaked.

Mark shrugged again. "Gets to be a bit old, really. People are basically slaves to impulses they're not even aware of, it's like eating a dragon's heart to learn the speech of birds and finding out that all they want is to eat worms and shit on your head. But it _is_ fun. For a while. Especially the parts that involve shagging..." Mark caught Owen's eyes, and a flash of a sensation he knew well:

_lust_

"_I'm_ not usually into blokes," Owen found himself protesting some while later, sweating in a tangle of purple sheets.

"It's only skin," Mark murmured into Owen's shoulder.

Bit late to object now, anyway. He'd given as good as he got, spurred on by the shivering echoes of refracted pleasure, and it might not have been his first choice of a pull for the night but one couldn't argue with results. "Just don't go thinking it's more than a bit of fun, yeah?"

Beside him a languid stretch. "I should go, you've work in a few hours. Think I can find my way out." Mark caught Owen's hands as he made to remove the pendant: "Keep it. Have fun. It might even improve your bedside manner." He planted a kiss on Owen's knuckles and rose to go, collecting scattered clothing with a brisk efficiency that somehow managed to retain an elusive sort of grace. "See you round, maybe."

Owen grunted and rolled over onto his stomach, not really paying his full attention to the fading sounds of Mark's exit (for a shag like that he was welcome to anything he might want to nick on the way out, shit, Owen would go help him with the telly but that would mean getting up); at length he managed to drag the duvet up over himself, to sleep like the well-shagged dead until his alarm blatted at ought-Jack-thirty. And then lay abed for as long as he dared, listening to the distant jangle of normal people's normal lives going on round him in other flats, and trying to thrust aside a persistent wisp of idle fancy about whether it might be nice if Mark _did_ turn up sometime for another go. Didn't need to give anyone else a chance to rip his heart out of his chest.

A slow walk to work, then, practising with his control over the device. By the time he'd got to the tourist office he could nearly block it out altogether, no more than a rumbling hint of hidden information to the faces floating past. (But he'd been doing that all his life, hadn't he, shutting them out so they wouldn't drag him down with --) Even that faded behind massed concrete barriers with his descent beneath the normal world, to his job and his Captain already lying in wait: "You're late, your first patient of the day is already here." Owen followed Jack's nod to a draped form on the worktable. "Turned up in an alley last night. I'm no doctor myself but --" Owen nearly gagged as he flicked aside the sheet -- "I'd say somebody's made off with this man's heart."

"When I want a lay opinion on a case I'll ask for one," Owen snapped, but halfhear -- erm, unenthusiastically, surveying the ruins of the ribcage. _What did they use, a post-digger?_ He shrugged into his lab-coat and reached for a pair of examination gloves, already calculating what sort of force might have produced this injury...

And conveniently 'forgot' to mention anything at all about last night, though the weight of the pendant nagged quietly at the edges of his mind even as he tried to concentrate on the shredded meat beneath his forceps. So, he'd turn it in later, but some further testing was wanted first, yeah? (Since his head would have exploded already if it was going to, and therefore he'd probably only be the one asked to volunteer to run the experiments anyway...) Dangerous to try it on Jack, of course, and probably mentally scarring besides assuming there was anything to be read from him at all, Owen was already convinced the man was some sort of sex-android that had fallen through the rift himself and decided he knew a good setup when he saw one...

But it wasn't as if he owed _Davidson_ anything, was it?

Almost too easy the way the man already wore his heart on his sleeve, but Owen rested his weight against the edge of the autopsy table and let himself hear... mostly something like a stream of inane chatter, the dullness of this report versus what he'd have been about at this time of the morning back in his old life, inchoate curiosity as to whether there were still any of the chocolate biscuits left that wasn't quite rising to the need to go and find out yet, checking in with his cock every nought point five seconds 'cos, bloke... Normal, in other words. Far too normal for this place, probably. And actually really boring. _Eating worms and shitting on your head, yeah_...

Ah, well, better applications for his trinket, maybe. Try to put all of this murder and mayhem out of his head to go out on the pull again tonight, see what wearing this thing was like doing a bird. Scientific comparison, yeah? Make a proper study of it. Not that he was _worried_, or anything, and you couldn't really point to that kiss as evidence of anything, he'd have snogged _Jack_ goodbye if he'd been trapped in that locker with him and not as if Davidson hadn't been kissing _back_, remember that whole argument about pocket-torches and pockets after they'd survived that Jack had overheard enough of to be smirking at them both for a week (and if this fucking lightweight hadn't forgot himself and _moaned_ at just the wrong instant)...

Oh, god, he _was_ turning bender, obsessing about Davidson's cock, _riding him while those huge hands cupped_ \--

Wait. _That_ wasn't coming from _inside_. Not unless he'd picked up a far curvier self-image somewhere in the last few minutes. Owen froze over his scalpel as tiny heels tapped across the platform above him. _Tosh... quiet boring swotty unlucky-in-love Tosh, and...?_

And was it any of his business, no, it was not any of his business who shagged that stupid twat, erm, who that stupid twat shagged, they were consenting adults after all and oh god he did not need to know how good it had felt to bury himself to the hilt in her as she cried out (another man's name) when Tosh laid her folder in front of Davidson. _Should have worn different trousers_ \-- "Owen? Are you all right?"

Jumping a mile at her voice probably hadn't helped anything, either. "Yeah, 's just... this is gruesome, even for us. Not something you get used to even working A&amp;E. I mean, what sort of nutter goes after _hearts_?"

"A romantic nutter?" Davidson suggested. Tosh put a hand to her mouth to conceal a giggle. _desire would she bum in those privacy around would he maybe now yes yes yes _\--

Owen stamped up the tiled steps and fled for the toilet. Peculiar sensation, not to know whether you wanted to toss off or sick up. He ought to start by flushing this fucking thing, never mind protocol or scientific advancement or fucking Torchwood's fucking bloody _archives_.

But even to get to the safety of a remote enough stall he'd have to go through the conference room, and _of course_ here was Ianto in his path, absorbed in his beloved coffee machine. Bending over it like he must have bent over his machine girlfriend in their cellars, and wasn't that a twisted metaphor for a twisted fucked-up man, hand on a lever like a caress --

_miss her_

Owen paused, struck by the clarity of the borrowed sensation.

_miss her so much like rats why didn't they_

Recognising it.

_why didn't they kill me too_

"Oi, sorry, I..." Now Ianto was looking at him in naked confusion. "Sorry. About... Yeah."

That wisp of hopeless loss and longing had turtled away somewhere behind Ianto's mask of inscrutability again, but Owen could still hear or feel or smell or whatever the fuck you'd call this extra sense the faintest trace of something more than mere irritation that he might have been interrupted in his oh-so-pressing chores to be sent to see if there were any more of the chocolate biscuits. In Owen's ears the rasp of his own breath and in his head the buzz of two minds passing beneath him somewhere, _fall for quiet place those legs falling for_ \-- "Listen, mate, I..."

Ianto looked at the hand on his shoulder with a sceptical lift of his eyebrows, but when the blue eyes tracked back up to Owen's face there was something else behind them, some spark of surprised connection. Owen wondered if the pendant could transmit as well as receive. "You're not the only one here who's lost someone. 'S how Jack came to hire me. She was, she was my... What I'm saying is, it doesn't get better. But you learn to rearrange yourself around it. It's not always going to be the only thing you can think about."

The man was _very_ tightly wrapped, damn Torchwood One's psychic training anyway, but Owen sensed the tiniest undercurrent of a guard being relaxed, just the slightest. "Anyway. Any time you want to go get pissed."

Ianto appeared to be thinking about this offer as if it were so far beyond what a day's usual routine of bin-bags and coffee grounds might have tossed out to him that it was absorbing all of his computational power just to look at it straight on. Finally a small nod. "Yeah, maybe."


	3. Kiss, Kiss

Typical Jack, to swan back in and get them entangled in a madman's scavenger-hunt right off the mark. Andy pointed his torch around at the cluttered shelves and heaped pallets of odd tat haphazardly, hoping to catch some glint or dullness that somehow stood out against the background of visual noise. "Not the exciting night out we were expecting, I don't think."

"I suppose you could have been out on the pull by now."

He cocked an eyebrow at Tosh's teasing smile. "Could I have been?"

"Owen would be."

"Owen probably _is_. He'll have sweet-talked Hart into skiving off to go clubbing, while here we are, doing the legwork." For all of Owen's posturing and cock-measuring the struggle for power in Jack's absence had been surprisingly brief, mostly because deep down the medic just couldn't be arsed to do the actual work involved. They'd probably get back to the Hub tonight and find him trying to distract their visitor from his failings with the file that they had decided was Jack's collection of alien wank mags.

They'd all been wrestling with Jack's absence in their own ways, throwing themselves into paperwork or programming or obsessive tidying or, in Owen's case, the rather anomalous reaction of swearing off sex for about three weeks. (Andy suspected he'd mostly been trying to wind the rest of them up.) More than once they'd all gone back together to someone's with videos and drink and woken in a fully-clothed pile of Torchwood knees and elbows, huddling together more for the comfort than warmth. At least once the pile had been considerably _less_ clothed. He wasn't sure whether some of the dates he couldn't personally account for might have involved retcon. But they'd managed, somehow.

And now he was back.

Too soon to tell if Jack bore any of them grudges for the mutiny. Andy's dreams were still haunted by that vision of Gwen pleading with him to set time right, to help her get back to her Rhys, and it had been ages before Tosh had been able to get through a night without waking up sobbing for her mother. He'd never even asked the others who they'd seen, or how long it had been before it stopped seeming quite so real, in the dark.

But then, they'd never asked him, either. They were British, after all, acculturated to pasting on stiff upper lips in the face of the terrors, or just needed to pretend that _one_ of them came close to being something like a grownup and he was the best that they could do, newest to this or not. Maybe it was _because_ he was the latecomer, not as tangled up in unhelpful memories of the last twelve times something had tried to eat them all. And if leadership meant he was the one to inherit the other nightmares, the stranger ones about ice and blood and shining sharp spheres... he wasn't entirely surprised that Jack had rarely seemed to sleep.

"I think it's on the third shelf up," Tosh said, prodding at her handheld.

Just about over even his head, but Andy grasped the edge of the shelf and stretched up until he could see an inconspicuous grey tube. He fetched it down and presented it to her with a flourish. "You're brilliant, have I told you that recently enough?"

Tosh lifted her chin at him playfully. "Always bears repeating."

"No, I mean it, you're..." _You're Tosh. You're our Tosh. You're my quiet, brave Tosh_. Who never ever flinched when it came to it, who'd used that marvellous brain to rescue herself from a fate he still couldn't quite bring himself to look at straight on, and brought him tea as he sat vigil over a body that lay cold yet incorruptible as the saint Jack most assuredly was _not_ \-- "Marry me?"

"What?"

_Oops_. "Right, erm, yeah, I know, this isn't very _romantic_, or anything, standing here in a warehouse and all, but... Been, erm, trying to work up to asking you a while now, never seems to _be_ a good moment, so, I..."

"This _is_ our lives, after all," Tosh said. "Wouldn't really be _honest_ to try to do this the way everyone else would." And took Andy's hand. "All right: yes. Let's do it."

"Jack will go spare," he said giddily, and caught sight of Captain Hart approaching them in the dim light, pale eyes glittering with wary assessment of the two mad grins. "We're getting married," Andy blurted.

Hart cocked his head at them. "Are you, now." He reached out to lift Toshiko's fingers to his lips as if for a formal kiss, then seemed to change his mind at the last moment and drew her in for a hard snog. She coughed as he turned her loose, spluttering indignantly, and suddenly it was _his_ turn for a mouthful of tongue --

"Oi, gerroff!" Andy shoved at the red-jacketed shoulders, strangely solid under his hands, or was it his _hands_ that were suddenly not quite at the ends of his arms? "Don't you, _ever_..."

"Sorry, this isn't the queue for congratulations?"

Andy's lips were on fire, Tosh had sunk gasping to her knees, he couldn't, he couldn't get in much of a _breath_ \-- "What have you done to us?"

"Just a bit of poison lippie." As if it were merely a _fashion_ where he came from. Hart squinted at Andy; "Although I ought not to have been such a gentleman about kissing her first, leaves me rather warm lips but no friendly drop to help you after. Well, mostly."

Andy sat down hard on the filthy concrete as his legs folded under him. Tosh was breathing in tiny pants, sprawled full-length in the dust. "What have you done with _Owen_?"

Hart shrugged. "Last I saw him he was trying to dig a bullet out of his own stomach. Might even have managed it by now, he's a clever one." He regarded them with an arched brow as Andy forced a trembling hand out to touch Tosh's cheek. "You're sweet, really, you are, but I'm a very busy man, I'm sure you'll understand if I'll just be buggering off now." He bent to retrieve the canister from where it had rolled from Tosh's limp fingers, then dropped all the way into a squat to lean closer to the two stiffening faces; "Tell you what, though, I _might_ even tell Jack he needs to find you before the damage gets to be irreversible." A flicker of red at the corner of fading vision as Hart turned to go. "Call it a... wedding present."


	4. Eve

All of that and she was still more happy to be back to work, Tosh thought with rueful amusement at herself, feeling her pace quickening the nearer she came to the great cog door. Perhaps it was just that after nearly five years anyone would have grown closer to the people she spent so much of her time with than the okasan of fading memory, the stiff formality of adult strangers barely given time to thaw before she was rushing back to her flight and this dank hole in the ground and Owen giving her his best _fuck, she came back_ look. Maybe she'd missed a memo while she was gone, he looked nice today, all got up to a far higher standard than his usual casual-Friday-at-the-hostel taste --

There was a strange woman sitting at Tosh's workstation. "Excuse me? Who are you?"

A moment of confused panic in wide blue eyes before the interloper rose and smiled at Tosh broadly. "I _work_ here? Three years? We went shopping for shoes before you left, remember?" She slipped an arm around Toshiko's waist. "Best mates, except when you broke the strap on my favourite purse."

Yes, Eve had been furious about that, Tosh thought, seeing the links of a delicate chain slither through her fingers and separate -- "Just having you on, it feels like I've been away so long," she said, returning the hug. "Have I missed anything good?"

"Just the usual inappropriate snogging," Jack said, with a roll of his eyes for the way that Eve had gone to lean over Owen at his workstation. "Deliver me from newlyweds, huh?"

Yes, looked like it would be just another day back at the office, with Jack swaggering about, and Ianto ducking him to try to get the actual work around here done, and Andy, their ex-police junior operative, peering over his hopelessly clunky spectacles at Owen. As usual. Ianto leant closer with Tosh's coffee to remark, "Tragic, really. If he would just admit to _himself_ that he fancies blokes..."

"I suppose so," Tosh said absently, wondering why this conversation felt as if she was hearing it distorted through water. Had Ianto's bum always looked so good in jeans?

...No, she was here to work, whatever Jack's loose standards might have allowed for. Tosh set up her travelling laptop to interface itself with the mainframe and sank into a contented half-trance of maths and data, losing herself deep in the intricacies of code, until time had gone quite away and she couldn't help but jump at the sudden tumult of Owen storming down the stairs from the conference room where he'd been sorting that artefact with Andy, in a lather at the man trailing along behind: " -- _Completely_ inappropriate. I mean, you haven't noticed that I'm married? To a bird? You know, hair, tits, big brown -- Erm." Eve had folded her arms across certain of said attributes. "I'm about to be sleeping on the sofa tonight, aren't I."

"I'm, I'll, erm, I'm for home, then," Andy said forlornly. _Poor thing, it's like teasing a puppy_. She did rather like him, really, if she'd been in the market she might even consider --

But that was silly, when she knew perfectly well how all-consuming it was to fancy someone unattainable. Owen had settled back at his workstation in a funk that even Eve's hands working at his knotted shoulders didn't seem to be easing at first. The former constable gave them a lingering glance back as he scuttled past to fetch his coat that nearly broke her heart to see it, all confused longing and dashed hopes that she must have worn on her own face sometimes, not so long ago. But she was over that now, she'd found -- she'd found --

Eve gave her shoulders a quick hug in passing as she went off up the stairs to powder her nose. Touchy-feely women usually made Tosh want to shrink away into herself, too many memories of attempts to winkle a shy girl out of her shell whether she wanted to go or not, but there _was_ something nice about having someone so spontaneous and warm on the team now, someone to cheer them up in their gloomy cave-dwelling lives. Look how she'd even brightened _Owen_, sitting there with a faint smile on his lips instead of that tired old sneer. Probably thinking about how good it was to have a regular mate to go home with at night, off the endless treadmill of casual shags at last. (And it was so good -- but how would she know that, she'd never, not really...) What had she just been thinking about? Ah, well, gone now...

Tosh made it through another hour before Jack laughingly all but wheeled her jet-lagged and yawning out the door in her desk-chair. She suspected he'd have driven her home himself, if Ianto hadn't been giving him one of those _as soon as we get shut of the kids_ sort of looks. It _had_ probably been a mistake to come in even for the partial day, but with all that to transfer from the laptop she'd brought along and then the new changes she'd thought of as she drove in, and she'd wanted... she'd wanted to... Oh, she wanted her bed and to get out of these tights, her feet were killing her. And it didn't help to stumble over something as she went to flip on a light in her flat. _Trainers? I don't own any grey trainers, those are twice the size of my _feet --

A rustling from the bed as the light came on and then a startled shriek. Andy Davidson, late of the Cardiff police, was sitting bolt upright in _her_ dark sheets, clutching the duvet to his bare (and impressively hairy) chest. "What, what the _hell_ \-- Toshiko?"

"Andy?"

"What are you doing in my flat?"

"_Your_ flat? Why, how are you, you're _naked_, you'renaked in my_ bed_ \--"

"I _live_ here! What are _you_ doing here? How did you get the keys?"

"Ianto has copies of all of our keys, _you_ must have --" Tosh stopped herself and took a shuddering breath. "Something is very wrong here."

"I'll say." Andy started to get up, then thankfully thought better of it and clutched the duvet to his chin. "We're flatmates? I mean, I _know_ I live here..."

"Why would we be _flatmates_? This is an open-plan -- why would we be flatmates?"

But she had his picture everywhere, some the both of them together, one beside the telly where they were even exchanging a kiss? (A scrap of memory, Ianto saying _You don't have to be bisexual to work here but you'd be missing out at the office parties_...) Andy was glaring at her. "That's _my_ dressing-gown there on the peg behind you, could I please have it?"

Tosh reached blindly and came back with a length of drab plaid. She tossed it to him and he sat fuming silently until she averted her eyes. "I'm going to call Jack," she said to cover the sounds of cloth rustling.

Nowhere to go but over to the kitchen, but then she'd never thought to want for privacy in _her own_ flat. Her mobile rang through to voicemail three times straight before she could collect herself enough to remember the number that would sound every alarm in the Hub, loud enough to wake the dead if it had to. Or the shagging, more like. Finally the Captain picked up, all carefully restrained annoyance even as she cut him off: "Jack, there's something strange going on, I've just got home and Andy's here in my flat --" (_Toshiko is in_ my_ flat_, Andy protested from behind her, loud enough that Jack made a surprised little noise --) "I don't know, I don't know what he thinks he's doing here, how he got _in_ \--"

Jack had switched to the steady stream of calm assurances Tosh had seen him use on any number of the victims of Torchwood's routine fiascos, usually right before he retconned them. It _did_ actually make you want to slow down and listen to him despite yourself. She took deep breaths until she was able to concentrate on the words, a part of her noting abstractly that it was about equal parts _this is what we're going to do to make this be Not Bad_ and _he's probably more scared of you_, as if Andy were a bear who'd wandered into her flat by mistake. After he seemed to have decided she was soothed enough that he could ring off Toshiko folded the phone upon itself and stood staring blankly at it for a long moment, trying to recall anything that he'd specifically _said_. "He's going to bring Owen over to see if there's any possible medical explanation for this."

"Like what? That aliens have bodysnatched our flats?" Andy pulled the belt of the dressing-gown tighter (_why _would_ there be a robe that big in my flat?_) and huffed down onto her sofa.

"Or that one of us has gone mad," Tosh shot back, desperately hoping that it wouldn't turn out to be her. "Or accidentally got into the retcon?" (In fact, now she thought about it --)

From the sudden softening of Andy's face this last option seemed to have jumped to the top of his list as well. "It could be a delayed reaction from some time we'd been retconned before," he agreed sombrely, shifting aside for her to join him on the sofa. "Like Suzie's pet." Here he ran a hand through his hair nervously; "Oh, god, are we about to turn into serial killers? My Mam still thinks I'm issuing the public-indecency citations after the football --"

She didn't have an answer for him. They sat side by side on the sofa, carefully not touching, until the bell from downstairs went. Tosh rose stiffly and went to let her colleagues in.

"All I can say is this had better be good, Tosh. Do you have _any_ idea how hard it was to get those tickets?" Owen in a tux was oddly endearing, even as his eyes blazed with indignation. "Worse bloody hours around here than the NHS --"

"You're not the only one they're putting out, Owen," Ianto snapped. (Tosh was trying her best not to picture how his shirt had come to be on inside-out since she'd last seen him.) "Right, Jack, where do we even _start_ with something like this?"

"Step number one, Owen looks them over while we try to work out if anything unusual's happened at work that we might not have noticed at the time." Jack scooped up Tosh's laptop and pushed it into Ianto's hands. "See what you can get from internal CCTV for the last couple of days. Usual drill, any detail no matter how small."

Owen sat her down in a chair under the floor-lamp he'd given her when it hadn't suited his new flat. Tosh followed his murmured prompts, trying to ignore the rattle of Ianto's fingers moving over keys, and Andy standing there in that dressing-gown looking as if someone had just told him he'd need to have this fish in his ear. "Nothing out of the ordinary physically that I can see," their medic finally concluded with a scowl. "Which suggests you've just finally cracked under the pressure, I reckon. Maybe you can get the bloke that gave you that rock to come visit you when we put you away somewhere quiet."

Tosh stretched out her left hand and stared at the flash of an elegant solitaire. (Tommy, Tommy Brockless, he'd been happy for her, he'd said _you've got a_... got a... "_You've got a new beau?_") "I don't remember you having a boyfriend, Toshiko," Eve said.

(When had she come in?)

Owen gave his wife a sidelong look. "S'pose she _could_ be winding us up with it," he said. "Wouldn't put it past her to come back from hol with a story to make herself look better after she lost out to you."

"Oi, _you're_ the one Ianto had to comb every pub in the city for that night after -- after we..." Andy faltered, a puzzled frown spreading across his boyish features.

"Right, _two_ bloody amnesiacs, almost forgot that bit. Down here, then, let me waste some more of my valuable time making sure you're a mental as well and then maybe we can get back in time for the third act." Owen started rooting through his instruments again. "Put you away together, sure she'd like that..."

Jack had drifted into the kitchen to poke through the fridge, though whether he was searching for evidence or just considering helping himself to her food Tosh wasn't entirely sure. Now he closed the door again and stood staring at it with the oddest expression, presently remarking, "You've got enough pictures of Andy I'd start to think you were stalking him, Tosh. If you didn't have so many of the rest of us as well. In fact, you've got pictures of everybody you _know_ on here. Except for Eve."

Was it Tosh's imagination, or had Eve gone stiff? "You know how the camera adds twenty pounds, Jack, I've told Tosh how I hate having my photo taken --"

Ianto suddenly sat up straight from the laptop. "But you shouldn't be able to avoid the CCTV. But you _have_. Or... something." He enlarged a window until they could all see the timestamps, then advanced it carefully; "There doesn't seem to be any record of her being in the Hub."

Jack fixed Eve with his gruffest _Captain of this ship_ look. "Care to explain yourself?"

Eve was all hurt blue eyes now. "Jack, I've been working for you for the past three years. You gave me away at my _wedding_. Don't you remember?"

"Around here? Memory's hardly evidence, lady. Or whatever you might actually be. Since I prefer to leave the vampires who don't show up on film to bad late-night tv, I'm thinking maybe you're some kind of virus in our collective subconscious. Only it'd be hard to run your program on our wetware, so you keep shuffling details around to make space for yourself -- Owen, what color are her eyes?"

"Don't be an arse, Harkness --"

"Simple question, Harper, the color of your wife's eyes?"

Owen swallowed. "They're brown," he said, sounding as if he were having to force out the words. "About the same colour as mine."

"But they're _green_," Andy said. "Like Gwen Cooper's. Green as a bottle. Well, a cheap bottle --"

Tosh looked to Ianto. "Grey like my Mam's," he murmured.

Jack drew his pistol. "Now, I don't actually know if shooting you would have any effect, if you're nothing but a communal hallucination. But if you only exist because we _believe_ you do, maybe we'd all expect to see you go down."

Owen interposed himself between Eve and the gun. "No one is shooting _my wife!_"

Tosh glanced over at Ianto's carefully neutral expression. "He's right, Jack, there has to be some other solution. If she's only here because we think we remember that she is --" And she swayed as the obvious answer presented itself. "Oh. Of course."

Andy was right with her thoughts: "We have to not remember her?"

"What? What sort of a plan is that?"

Jack began burrowing round in his overcoat pocket with his free hand. "It's simple, though, if she _is_ who she says she is, no harm done, right?"

Owen's eyebrows had set into an ugly knot. "Retcon is not a recreational drug, Jack."

Andy was frowning thoughtfully behind those horrid spectacles. "And how would we know how far back we needed to go? We don't have a way to know how long she's been here --"

"I wore suits to work until Tuesday," Ianto said from his post in front of the laptop. "Seems indicative of something."

"Two days, then." Jack handed Tosh a small vial. "If you'd do me the honor of calculating the dosages --"

Since their medical officer didn't look as if he was having any of this. Tosh's hysterical vision of having to hold Owen down and tickle his neck to force him to swallow the pills shattered as the medic drew his own gun. To point it at _her_ \-- "Why am I always the one who has to lose everything?" The barrel trembled wildly. "You took Katie, you took Diane, you took, you took... Mark?" Owen's face twisted in confusion.

"Honey? Who's Mark?" Eve reached to take his arm --

"_Back off_," Jack barked, sounding more like a cheap gangster than a boss. _Late-night telly, indeed_. "For all we know you work by skin contact. You stand over there away from the rest of us. If you're still here when we wake up, _then_ you get to explain why we all decided to take a nap in the middle of Tosh's living room, but not before."

"No, this is, this is _bollocks_, I remember wearing this at the, at the..." Owen stopped, and took a deep breath, eyes gone unfocused and too bright. "But I can't have, she... she died before we..."

Ianto's voice was heartbreakingly gentle in the sudden silence: "Owen. Eve's not real."

Brown eyes squeezed shut as the wavering gun finally lowered. Tosh could see a glitter of moisture on his dark lashes. Slowly, Owen reached up, and pulled the knot of his tie loose, a child caught out at dress-up.

***

 

Tosh went to stretch and smiled to herself as she realised that she'd fallen asleep curled up on the sofa against her fiancé, cheek snuggled to the triangle of furry chest left bare by his dressing-gown. "I shouldn't have sat down when I came in, here I am still in my _stockings_."

"We must have made an early night of it," Andy said into her hair. "I don't even remember you getting in from the airport."

"Sympathetic jet-lag." She pulled herself up a bit straighter and kissed him. "Now _that's_ a proper boyfriend."

"Just don't expect me to do the sympathetic morning-sickness," he said, and then his ears went endearingly pink; "Erm, that is, if we ever decided to..."

"We work for Torchwood," she said, pushing herself up to rise. "Jack could probably arrange for _you_ to carry the babies." She grinned at his not-entirely-mock-horrified look and turned to begin shimmying out of rumpled travelling clothes. Stockinged feet scattering a small heap of sand...


	5. Something Blue

They'd got a traffic cone. That seemed to be the important part, somehow. It wasn't a good night unless you woke up in bed with your best mate and a traffic cone, Andy was reasonably sure he'd got this on a t-shirt or something. So Owen was spooning him, and he was spooning the traffic cone, and it had been a good night. Yeah.

He was supposed to be somewhere. That was probably why Ianto was sitting in that chair over there, giving them his best _you are interfering with the neat and tidy operation of my system_ look. That was probably why Ianto was in this bedroom, full stop. Zombies didn't need anything from bedrooms, whatever Jack still had to say about that. He'd crept in to watch the normal people sleep, because if he'd crept into Jack's bedroom it'd have been too many bad necrophilia jokes instead, and yes, _there_ was the headache.

Funny he could remember the zombie part and not where he'd been last night.

Owen seemed to be coming awake. Either that or his left shoulder had learnt how to swear. "Izzat a _traffic cone_?"

"...Yeah."

"Fuck me, must have been a proper piss-up. Tell me that's not Ianto."

"Think it is, actually."

"Tell me neither of us is naked."

"Tell me you have enough of a sense of shame left for blackmail to have any bloody effect," Ianto retorted. "Or that Jack doesn't already have six pictures of you on file wearing a policewoman's helmet and suspenders."

"Seven," Owen replied defiantly, and tried to sit up. It didn't go very well. "_Proper_ piss-up," he mumbled into Andy's neck.

"It's eleven-thirty and we have to be at the church by one," Ianto continued, giving the debauched scene on the bed a jaded look as he stood up. "I'll make you some coffee, not that I'm sure it's going to help, the state you're both in, and then we'll just... have to pull it together as best we can. I'll ring Tosh and let her know you're alive, see if _she's_ still on for it."

"Whaz'z Tosh to do with it?" Andy managed to gather together enough neurons to ask once the unquiet dead had left the bedroom.

"She might be worried 'cos of that thing bit you last night?" Owen hazarded, sounding none too sure of the conjecture.

Andy sort of recalled that part, some chase through a disreputable lav that had left him with a bunged-up arm and late for the damned party he couldn't even remember much of after all of that. There had been guns, and shouting, and then Jack had hit it with a shovel and they'd all gone to the pub. Or maybe Jack had hit _him_ with the shovel and then the pub had shot them, it fitted the state of his head more closely. Christ, but this was a hangover for the ages. "Maybe she was just as pissed as us when he put her in a taxi," he guessed, trying to fit the idea into the vague outlines that were filling in. "...Oi, did Ianto just say something about a _church?_"

Something finally connected behind the eyes peering round his shoulder. "Your wedding."

Andy lurched upright at the words, memories of a particularly vulgar pole-dance slotting themselves back into place in his head as his stomach did a barrel roll. He absentmindedly reached to clutch grumbling innards --

And froze, fingers encountering an unfamiliar swell of taut skin.

_Bloody Torchwood. Tell me that's some sort of stag-do jokey comedy belly, even working _here_ it's still bloody absurd that I'd be_...

"Owen, why am I pregnant?"


	6. Drifters

"Look, I don't blame you for not coming to the wedding, I know it's still a bit much."

Rhys shifted uncomfortably. He'd set the invite beside the ansaphone when it had come in the post, fully intending to pick it up later to sort his reply, and there it had sat for the next three months, gathering reproachful dust whilst somewhere in the back of his mind green eyes scolded him for his cowardice. "Must have been mental, I keep hearing stories about the bride going after your Mam with a _chainsaw_?"

"Does Toshiko weigh nine stone in wet clothes?" Andy countered, although his eyes had gone guarded. Must have been one _cracking_ do. Should have gone, aye, but all he'd have been able to see would have been how Gwen would have liked this dress or Gwen would have hated these flowers or Gwen would have been laughing herself sick at the thought of poor silly Andy finding anybody to marry at all. (What was she, _half_ his size?)

But at least Andy seemed to be getting on with his life. That was what _he_ was supposed to be doing, wasn't it, getting on with it all. Seeing his mates, climbing the ladder at Harwood's, scolding himself for eating too many chips. And he tried, he did try. Even if he sometimes wondered what the point of pretending to care anymore was. "You didn't ring me just to have a coffee," the ex-copper said as Rhys absent-mindedly poured a third sugar into his cup.

"Might have done."

"You _hate_ the coffee here, you've been on about it as long as I've known you. And before you say it you haven't _ordered_ any chips."

"Still a copper then, can't get anything past you." (He'd meant to, actually, only he'd been stuck in the bloody traffic on the way over and barely got here before Andy'd walked in. And it wasn't as if he needed the sarky remarks if he could help it...) Rhys settled back in his seat. "So, this woman I work with, her sister's boy disappeared, right? He's fifteen, ordinary kid, only she _swears_ he was abducted by aliens. I know, 's probably rubbish, yeah? But you can't tell me after that ruddy _space-whale_ things like that wouldn't be going on in this city."

Andy drew in a deep breath before he replied, calmly, "First off, what about the regular police? There are _channels_ for these things that aren't to do with me anymore."

Rhys gave him his best Look. "Course she's been to the police! But it's like none of them seem to care, I mean, Gwen would've, _you_ would've, but to the rest of the plodders he's just another kid's run off, they're not sat with his auntie listening to her crying down the phone with his Mam every tea-break. And when kids disappear they don't just _disappear_, y'see? Not into thin air on the middle of the barrage."

He had Andy's attention now. "Thin air."

"'S why I _rang_ you, aye? One minute he's texting her he's on his way home, she can see him from her window even, the next it's like something came along and -- _beamed him up_. So the first thing I've been thinking is tell it to your lot, yeah? And even if it isn't aliens, maybe your special-ops mates could at least do something to convince her that he's been looked for _properly_, given it the time and tech and all that. Otherwise what do we have this bloody Big Brother CCTV police-state _for_? You must be able to do all those sci-fi computer things to a video and tell what your suspect had for breakfast."

He could see Andy was wavering, the same slight furrow appearing between his brows that Gwen had always got when something tripped her into full-on _investigating officer_ mode. "I could ask Tosh to run a check on the footage from the barrage that night," he said. "No promises, I mean, it's just working from the same information that the police would have had, but... She _is_ good."

From the fond little smile the former copper was still in the stage of it all where he couldn't believe his luck. And Rhys wished them both all the best, really, Gwen would have been so -- He shied away from completing that thought and got up to go, leaving the barely-tasted coffee sitting lonely on the table. "Right, well then, ring me later, aye? If you find out anything, or if you don't... yeah."

(He was _not_ going to order chips on his way out. Not whilst Andy was still here to see it. He'd just have to double back later, after his shift...)

***

 

Same chippie, same bloody awful coffee. Its only saving grace was that their tea was even worse. They just _had_ to go and make the best flippin' chips he'd ever tasted, the contrary sods. Rhys stuffed the last one into his mouth and tried to look innocent as Andy slid into the seat opposite. "Any news then?"

Andy's was not a face that ought to be made to look that glum, he just couldn't quite get it not to come off like a schoolboy who'd been caught out smoking in the lav. "Nothing they could make of the data. Tosh said it was like expecting her to be able to flip round a photo of the back of someone's head so you could see their face."

Rhys blinked at him. "That's it then?"

"If it's nothing to do with us, then yeah, pretty much. Kids _do_ just go missing sometimes. Hate to break it to you, but it's hardly ever aliens, you know."

Rhys leant back in his seat and stared at his -- _yeah, admit it, you're friends, without Gwen to have a go at each other over_. "What's got into you, mate? You're talking like all the rest of the coppers his Mam's knocked heads with. I know you can be a right bastard sometimes but you were never this _hard_."

"Well, people change, yeah?"

"The biggest bloody marshmallow on the force? Gwen always said if you ever bought it on the job it'd be breaking your neck helping some kiddie down from a tree. It's this Torchwood, man, they've got inside your _head_."

"Maybe they've had to. And _kids disappear_, Rhys. Every day. The ones the police find later covered in trackmarks are the lucky ones, half of them. At least those there's an answer."

"Are you gonna tell that to his Mam, then? To _all_ of their Mams?"

"I don't know what more you expect me to _do_."

"Your bloody _job_, maybe," Rhys snapped, standing up to wrestle angrily into his jacket. "'Special ops', it's all _bollocks_, isn't it. You and your flash bastards don't have any more idea what's gone on than the rest of us. If Gwen were here she'd have been all over this and you bloody well know it. And if you're going to decide that this time me remembering her isn't worth not setting your mates on me to bugger up my memory, then you can just do what you have to do, but you're the one has to live with it, aye?" Rhys stalked out of the shop, leaving Andy to gawp unattractively after him.

***

 

Rhys fumbled for his mobile, trying to focus on the number ringing him up at -- half six? "Changed your mind, then, you bastard?"

"_What? I -- Listen, can you meet me at the harbour in twenty minutes? It's about that kid. I think_."

"You _think_. You've rung me up it's barely light out and you're not even sure?"

"_Look, do you want my help or not?_"

"Yeah, yeah, I do, I... thirty alright?"

Andy grunted his acceptance and rang off. Rhys thought for a moment and then left a message at work to say he might be in late. Or not at all, if this was some excuse to get him out on the water somewhere and leave him off to think that he was an amnesiac waiter in Minorca for all he bloody knew...

The former copper met Rhys at a boat slip, looking gormless as always, although the wife appeared to have made some headway already dressing him better, with a cuppa in each hand and a rucksack slung over one shoulder. "No bloody guarantees," he warned as Rhys reached out for one of the cups, and pulled a dog-eared paper from his pocket. "But I think it's a lead."

Rhys unfolded a sheet of A4 that looked like it had come out of an overworked public printer, just an internet map showing bits of coast and the Bristol Channel. "Going treasure-hunting then, are we? Proper pirate map would have an X marks the spot."

"It's centred on Flat Holm island," Andy said, tapping the speck in the middle of the graphic. "Maybe your 'alien abductors' are an unusually aggressive colony of seagulls?" He heaved a sigh. "At least if we're being messed about it's not so far to go chasing after."

"Could have sent you out to Lundy I suppose," Rhys agreed, trying to make the best of it. "And this was all you got out of them? Who's the one playing silly buggers with the new bloke, then?"

"Dunno, bag was on my chair when I got in but everyone was already on a call."

Must have had to get in half-_five_, the poor sods. Rhys almost felt a little bad for him. Almost.

It wasn't that long of a trip out to Flat Holm, not even long enough for Andy to properly finish his story of how their PA bloke seemed to have somehow become a zombie since the last time Rhys had got mixed up in one of Torchwood's mental operations. Although he was still trying to tie off the threads as they stepped off the boat onto a rickety jetty. "They, erm -- there's a reason Jack never tried to discourage me and Tosh on the fraternisation. Erm." Rhys was pretty sure that Andy was blushing. "Anyway. He's your missing kid, where do _you_ think we should start with this?"

Oh, right, put this on _his_ head so Andy didn't have to be the one facing up to the Mam when this turned out to be his new mates having a go? Rhys squinted up the cliff at the scrubby landscape. "Get up into the lighthouse, we can see where we're at, yeah? Faster than walking all round the island looking in the bushes."

Andy was impressed. He was going to be as much of a bastard about it as he could, Rhys couldn't fault him for the way the game was played, but they'd both know which one of them wasn't as thick as he looked _this_ morning. "Fiver says it's locked."

"Out here? Bloody seagulls gonna use it as a lookout when they're taking over the shipping lanes?" Rhys shook his head. "Take the copper out of the city, mate..."

It _was_ padlocked, actually. Rhys dug in his wallet with a frustrated sigh as Andy murmured something about the universality of vandalism. "Right, well, that's that then, you want to go round one way whilst I --"

"I never said it was going to _stop_ us, did I?" Andy was rummaging inside his jacket for something.

And pulled out a gun --

"Jesus _christ, _man! Where did you get _that?_"

"Work."

Rhys took another step back as Andy lined up and sighted on the lock. "Bloody hell, is that place special ops or MI6? Do you know how to _use _that thing?"

"First thing I learnt." Andy took the padlock off with one neat shot. "Jack is... a very good teacher. Wouldn't recommend his _methods_, exactly, but they are effective." He kicked at the panel when it jammed on rusty hinges and it yielded with a howl someone'd probably be wondering at back on the mainland.

One hundred and seventy-one bastard, sodding, _bastard_ stairs later, they had as pretty a view of the Channel as ever Rhys could have asked for, if he hadn't been too busy wondering if he was about to die to appreciate it properly. "If you say... _one word_... about chips..."

Andy had collapsed against the windows at the other side of the lantern room, looking a bit green himself. "So much for the notion of retiring to be a lighthouse keeper somewhere. Bugger, all I can see is Somerset. Anything on yours?"

Rhys had the sightline back to Cardiff, graceless hump of the Millennium Centre visible if he strained, but it was the patch of scrub below that they'd fought their way up here to survey; "Few buildings. Bunkers from the war and all that. Look ruined mostly. But..."

Andy had made it back to his feet by now, the benefit of staying in trim to run down suspects. "What?"

"That bit there, to the left: everything's overgrown, but that looks as if someone's been messing it about. Ground's bare like people come in and out a lot. Nothing over there to interest that many bloody _tours_, is it?"

"If that's a nest of blue-arsed slow-worms you're buying when we get back, mate."

But he'd wrung a reluctant smile from the copper. Rhys found it in him to grin back. "Not so bad at this special-ops bollocks, am I?"

They wouldn't have found anything without that bird's-eye look, not much to tell one slightly scruffier patch in the scrub from another down here in it, but alerted for breaks in the pattern it wasn't so difficult to locate an entryway in the clump of bunkers where the grass was too trampled down for the casual traffic of ecotourists to account for it properly. Down the corridor beyond they came to a blast-door fitted with a suspiciously newer-looking electronic bell. "Do we ring it?"

Andy shrugged and pressed the button. Rhys couldn't help but jump at the rattling buzz, realising he'd not expected it to work at all. "Maybe no one's in," the ex-copper said after a few moments without any sort of response.

"Popped down to the shops, yeah?" Rhys chuckled uneasily, wondering if he were just as happy to have this mad errand end here. "Island this size, must have at least two Starbucks --"

"_Yes, yes, I'm coming, who's there?_" A woman's voice, at least, probably not some seven-foot alien goon behind that door ready to eat them both then. Or was that Making Assumptions like Gwen would have warned him about --

"Torchwood," Andy told the intercom, and rattled off a string of numbers. Authorisation code, sounded like. My god, what had these Torchwood people got him into? Like something out of a bloody spy thriller, this was. Bond, Andy Bond. Sounded more like a comedy sketch. "Erm, Jack sent me out?"

The door groaned and opened just wide enough to reveal a short (_good that, right?_) woman dressed in maroon hospital scrubs like a porter. "He didn't say, but then you know Jack, always with his surprises. And this one is...?"

"He's, erm, trainee, Jack asked me to bring him out here for the tour."

Rhys smiled pleasantly and tried to look like a green recruit to a high-tech special-ops team. Not that he'd really know what one of those looked like, but then apparently neither did the porter, because she only returned his nervous grin and stepped back to let them both in.

***

 

The sun glittered off the waves breaking against the cliff below, in and back, in and back, steady beat of his world's heart. In, and back. Finally Andy spoke: "I didn't know, I swear."

There were sandwiches in the satchel, in case they'd been caught out by the boat returning late. Rhys didn't much feel like eating, the thought of it like ashes in his mouth (or, he didn't know, was that a bad metaphor, after?) but he took the cup from the thermos and managed to hold it steady as Andy topped it off with coffee. Very, very good coffee. "What are we gonna tell his Mam?"

"Dunno." Andy had been turning over in his fingers a small paper packet with _if you should need it_ written on in an elegant hand. Looked more like pills than prophylactics. "The truth, maybe."

"You think we _could?_"

"I'm not sure _what_ I think anymore. But it seems to be the one thing no one's _tried_." Andy crushed the paper into a twist and hurled it into the wind off the sea. "We should go. Don't want to make the boat wait."


	7. No Exit

"Torchwood's idea of a day off," Andy said, and started to laugh helplessly into his folded arms. "Sorry I had to go and drag you into this, mate."

"Aye, well, probably safer here than anything. Still dozens of coppers in this building, right?"

It hadn't helped the four most senior officers. Even after all this while with Torchwood the stink of blood was turning his stomach, too earthy and ultimately _human_ to pretend away like some stray whiff of ichor and ozone from an alien's exploding head. Beside him Rhys was still pale as a Welsh sheet from it all, the smell and the screams and the chalky terror of wondering if they'd be able between them to shift that column in time -- Andy took a deep breath that did little to steady him and lurched to his feet. "I need to get back to the Hub, you'll have to be the one to keep it together here."

"Me?"

The comm in Andy's ear was still relaying fragments of chatter amongst the rest of the team, clipped voices muttering tersely about power and servers and who was in position to attempt to sort what. He pulled it off and handed it to Rhys: "Let this sync to your phone so I can --" _hear the lot of you die_ \-- "I'll try to... I have to go."

It wasn't enough, it couldn't be enough, but it was all he had, one terrified man trying just as hard to live up to his own memories of Gwen Cooper. Like all those long, lost days that he wasn't Jack, couldn't possibly be Jack, but he _was_ Andy Davidson, and sometimes that had even been good enough. Rhys was already mumbling into the unfamiliar earpiece, explaining his sudden intrusion with an admirable steadiness. Andy turned away and ran like hell from the station.

The great cog rolled open to yield the sight of Captain John Hart, in the Hub, _their_ Hub, rifling through files on Tosh's computer -- "On your knees!"

"_You're_ a romantic."

"Now!"

Even Hart apparently understood the logic in choosing not to argue with a drawn gun. He put his hands on his head as if he practised this fairly often and knelt calmly on the decking. "I can find Jack," he said as Andy came up the stairs and touched the barrel to his temple. "But I don't know your system well enough to pick up my tracking signal with this primitive equipment --"

Andy motioned him to stay down and went scrabbling through the rubbish on Tosh's workstation for a spare comm, twisting it into his ear: "-- _Yeah, why not, just _buttle_ your way through the ravening hordes, you can ask them if they want a biscuit with their nice juicy leg of Ianto_ \--"

"_We can argue or I can do this_."

There was a... no, that couldn't have been what it sounded like. Not from Owen. "_Right, whatever. Good luck, you stupid bastard_."

"_Anyway zombie legs aren't juicy_."

"_Just go, will you? Andy, if you're there, we've got weevils near our positions, dozens of them --_"

"And I've got Hart here in the Hub."

"_Fucking perfect. Tell me you're already killing him slowly_."

"He says there's a tracer on Jack."

Tosh's voice now, doubled faintly through another pickup where she must have been huddling near Owen; "_I have a remote monitor here, what's the frequency?_"

Hart lifted an eyebrow and Andy nodded permission for him to rise. "Etheric particle signal, 200 betacycles. Might be a few metres down?"

A pause. Andy pictured her brow furrowing in concentration over her handheld. "_No signals even vaguely resembling that. Maybe if we can get back to the Hub I can recalibrate the -- Owen, where are_ \--?"

"_Transport_." Andy heard a small engine farting to life in the background. "_Here, you take the helmet_ \--"

Andy shook his head at the mental image of Torchwood resorting to nicking a Vespa to outrun the weevils and turned his attention to Hart's renewed tapping at Tosh's keyboard. "Last time I believe the bloody guarantee. Has she got anything like a Branksian filtering algorithm on this?"

He didn't even know what that _was_, but with Tosh apparently having removed her comm to put on the helmet they were left to muddle around the mainframe blindly, the organisational scheme for materials that only she amongst them understood anyway a web of opaque associations without her keys. "You know, the secret back-door is one of the first things _I_ go after in the pillow-talk," Hart observed mildly at Andy's fumblings.

"Piss off."

"Just saying --" The Time Agent looked up sharply at a snuffling growl. _Of course. Weevils in the streets, weevils loose in the Hub as well_. "Real pest problem around here, too."

Andy caught up the gun he'd set aside by Tosh's keyboard and squeezed off a shot at the weevil in the doorway of Jack's office. It grunted and went to one knee, staggered but not stopped. _Right, only makes them angrier than the boilersuits_...

The crash of the door from the car-park announced Tosh and Owen's entrance, quick glances to assess the situation and opening fire on the rogue weevils. Enough rounds scoring between them all to drop the aliens, if not kill --

Owen came up the stairs and raised his gun again to aim at Hart. Andy grabbed for his arm. "No, we might still need him. He can start by helping us get these weevils down the cells, if he's not cooperative we can _leave_ him there to think about it for a while."

Hart's face said he'd rather like to see Andy try to make good on that, but he moved readily enough to join Owen in hauling two of the three wounded aliens off towards the vaults. Andy spared a few precious seconds to touch his forehead to Tosh's, murmuring, "You can talk Ianto through the shutdown, love, I know you can. And then we're going to find Jack."

"Now I'm here I may be able to do more to trace that signal," she said, pulling away to take up her post at her workstation. "Ianto? Are you at Turnmill yet...?"

Weevils were heavy, especially as dead weight. By the time they'd reached the vaults Andy was stumbling, unable to concentrate on more than the narrow slice of flooring he could see without letting go his grip under the alien's arms as he dragged it backwards. But finally there was a doorway behind him, the sounds of strained cursing as Owen and Hart pulled their own passengers into other breached units alongside --

Three solid thunks as the doors to the cells swung closed. Andy dropped his weevil's shoulders to tap his earpiece: "Tosh? Tosh...? _Shit_, we've lost comms."

"I'd have pointed out that it was a trap, but you didn't actually give me the chance," Hart remarked petulantly from the next cell.

There was a long silence, and at length Owen said, "It's the part where I woke up this morning thinking about having a look-in at that new club the other side of the bay when I got off tonight and now I'm locked in with a weevil wondering if it's going to wake up peckish, that's what I haven't been able to work out."

Andy did still have his gun, for what that was worth, but the thought of euthanising, no, _executing_ an unconscious weevil in cold blood made his gorge rise despite the threat. Leave it until needs must, if it came to that. Presently he began rambling aloud to try to drown out his own morbid thoughts, sitting on the concrete bench with his knees drawn up and guessing from the occasional grunt of acknowledgement that Owen had chosen the corner of his respective cell just the other side of the wall. "And the whole, me and Tosh, I know you sort of... Never really _meant_ to come in here and sweep her off her feet, it just... happened."

He could picture the medic's face, screwed up into reflexive denial. "Well, yeah, I mean, if you hadn't... I might. Not saying I'd, but, I..."

"Oh, Lord and Lady, are we really having a meaningful moment here? I think I'm going to sick up. And you haven't provided adequate facilities for that in these cells of yours --"

"_Piss off_," Andy said in unison with Owen.

But it had been enough to disrupt the moment, damn Hart. Andy's throat was too dry to go on, anyway. Owen's turn now to rail against the silence, the steady cursing from the next cell almost like the soothing sound of rain on a roof.

And then, inexorably, it had come to this. "I spy with my little eye, something beginning with _W_."

"Wanker." Owen didn't sound as if his heart were in it, though. Andy was beginning to worry about him. "Oh, tell me you don't _actually_ have your hand down your trousers --"

"Jack?"

"You're neither of you very good at this game, you realise --"

But Andy _hadn't_ been imagining that flicker of dirty grey beyond the smeared perspex, three catches on three doors clicking open at a touch inside Jack's magic wrist-strap. The familiar sparkle in those blue eyes dulled by whatever it had cost him to make it back here, now, to be with them: "It's done." Andy buried his face shamelessly in an epaulette that smelt of damp earth, barely aware of Owen's quaking against Jack's other shoulder and some fatuous remark of Hart's in the background that the Captain, _his_ Captain, brushed off gently but firmly.

Jack was patting Andy's back now, not quite a warning that the situation was circling the brink of mortal embarrassment; "So, where's Tosh?"

Andy pulled back. "But, she didn't, rescue _you_...?"

The comms were still dead, and it took too long to get upstairs from the vaults. Andy broke into a run as he saw the trail of dark staining from Tosh's workstation down into the autopsy room, the small form propped against a chair in the midst of scattered syringes and gauze. And gore. Far, far too much gore for such a tiny woman. But Toshiko managed a trembling smile for her husband, as Owen knelt at her other side to render what assistance he could, drawing in a shaky breath to whisper, "Ianto's on his way. He... we stopped the meltdown. Just in time..."

"Tosh? Tosh? Stay with us, love, Tosh... _Toshiko_. Toshiko."

***

 

Owen's idea of being comforting was a drunken handjob and letting you sleep in his bed, but it made about as much sense as anything to do with Torchwood, these days. Somewhere around the third night they'd admitted that as suicide watches went they were both somewhat in need of adult supervision and fucked off down the pub, and things got easier, a little.

They'd had some... interesting conversations, in that pub, over a sea of bitter. Just as well everyone in this city had far more on their minds than the mad ramblings of two more drunks trying to self-medicate away the horror. "But, if you retconned yourself..."

The medic's eyes said he'd put in _his_ time considering pills in the palm of someone's hand, his own or Jack's, and drawn the same conclusions about the relative costs. "I wouldn't remember _her_." Andy sighed and knocked back the rest of his pint, poor man's effort at inducing temporary amnesia. But only temporary.

And now they were back to work as if nothing had happened, because there was work to be done and no one else who could do it. Owen had finally got round to the post-mortem this morning, as cursory a job of it as he could get away with for the purpose of the records but a final duty he had insisted upon performing himself. Andy wasn't quite sure if this was an act of self-flagellation or an admission of the esteem he'd held her in. His own day had been spent in sorting a report on the action, including a lengthy explanation of how a job offer would be a more efficient solution to certain issues that had arisen than retconning one Rhys Williams. He'd be surprised if Jack listened, but then again it wasn't exactly as if the man could make a case that even _breathing_ was a requirement for employment here.

There came a point where Andy realised he'd been sitting staring at the tangling pulse of the mainframe's idling state for a good while, report long since filed and a hapless biro clenched in his folded hands to no purpose. Owen had finally ventured out of the autopsy bay, looking over from his own workstation as if he were evaluating whether to suggest the medicinal application of an arseload of brandy. "Seriously, mate, you look worse than Ianto."

"Yeah, thanks for that." Andy laid the biro down on the desk and pinched the bridge of his nose. Go home, to dream of a too-tight gauntlet and the feeling of a knife slowly sinking into his chest? Or sit here at her computer until he dropped before it, going down fighting like they all would someday?

And their one consolation and constant: Ianto set Andy's mug down with a hand still and forever wrapped in gauze to protect cooked skin. The new machine's coffee might have lacked some phantom measure of the intensity Ianto's affection had drawn out of its predecessor, lost in that hail of frustrated bullets after the steamer had turned on him, but it was still better than mortal man deserved. Andy smiled thinly up at him. "Mate."

Ianto looked as if he were about to say something, but then settled for giving Andy's shoulder an awkward pat with his good hand. "I believe that's Zombie for _she did good_," Owen observed.

Jack would probably be watching them from the round window of his office, if Andy cared to look. "Never _enough_, is it. Everything we do, it's never enough."

"Never is," Ianto agreed sombrely. "But, like Jack says: the end is where we start from."


End file.
